Great against stall decks like fog engines when combined with sanguine bonds; or decks that revolve around damage mitigation, such as thunderstaff or the urza's armor. (Your no damage dealing creature is now gaining you life instead of doing nothing) The only minuscule issue I can see is the sacrificing.. Other than pretty decent card.

The 'oshi-' button it offers for any deck that uses 0 costing artifacts is nice as well.

A relic of the era when life-gain on its own was considered devastating. Had this thing just given the target lifelink when sacrificed, it still would have been weak, but at least usable in some fashion.

When homelands was released, I tried to put this in any deck. I thought "0 mana? What a bargain! Great art too!". :P Actually the card is horrible of course. The only good thing is that 0 mana cards are often parts of combos, but there are better ones than this.

Quite arguably the card with the worst art quality-card quality ratio,or possibly even the worst card ever printed (in the worst set, at that. ouch.)Its *only* saving grace is the 0 cc, and there are much better free artifacts out there.

@Weretarrasque (nice DD ref, btw)- the thing is huge, like a skyscraper-notice the forked lightning at the top?

If it were small, those arcs would be much fatter and less forked(sorry- special FX is my day job ;-) )